Ignition Advertising for Ubuntu

I was reading a very interesting blog post section today called “Relevance to Open Source and Paradigm shifts” by Alan Kay and SteveJ which is about how ideas in society change and how to achieve critical mass.

Central to the idea is that there is a large amount of people who think critically about how every tool can directly effect their current set of problems and another calculation of the number of people who only think externally. They put the figure at around ~80% of people who are “outer motivated instrumental reasoners”

These people, so the theory goes, will move towards what ever the majority of people use, even if they don’t want to. Think about MacDonnalds, even if you don’t like it, people still eat there. Those people are probably instrumental reasoners (although I don’t class it as food, but that’s a different story)…

So to take advantage of these ideas for Ubuntu LoCos and communities it would mean focusing very hard on a very small community or sector and focus all resources on getting that community up to 66% usage in order to get ignition, this is where the ideas will shift and everyone will believe that it’s normal to use Ubuntu (see Lindependence 2008, converting one town at a time).

Now getting 66% of everyone to use Ubuntu is going to be VERY hard indeed, that’s why the suggestion is to focus on small communities and then leverage those by brining in outsiders (in small enough numbers)

I have another convincing strategy: lie, well not quite lie, but basically we as a community should stop harping on about how _little_ of the market share we have, we should not discuss any market shares below 66% and we should shape our marketing in a way that makes us look like we believe Ubuntu is the natural thing that everyone is doing (even if they aren’t yet)

I’ve seen Apple do it with their Mac adverts, there are only about 12% in the US market of desktop users using Apple Computers, but if you were to ask people, there successful advertising campaign and their indifference to their low market position means that the general public’s mind-share is much greater. Everyone wants a Mac, even if they can’t afford it. Not being able to buy it of resenting buying a PC, but their mind-share still counts towards that magic 66% ignition threshold. (although it probably doesn’t help that they’re not really selling ideas, but life styles)

I would appreciate the input from other LoCo groups, what kind of message do you send out when you talk to members of the public about the position of Ubuntu? Do we say that it’s a new thing that everyone should be using, or do we say that it’s a new system that everyone is already using?

Comments most welcome.